JOIN THE TEAM!

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Staci of Pink Pooch Designs placed second in our June challenge (first place winner is no longer with EBW Team) with her Casablanca Photo Ribbon Bracelet. Her prize is the privilege of choosing the theme for the next challenge. Staci has chosen a really fun theme for the Etsy BeadWeavers August challenge:

Art Deco

What will the EBW team come up with for this challenge? I can hardly wait to see! Let your imaginations go and see what you come up with...lots of room for your creativity here!

Rules:Any style, any technique with a majority of beadweaving is welcomeONE only entry per personMust be created between June 30, 2008 and August 5th, 2008

Thank you, Staci, for such an inspiring theme. OK everyone, if you've already finished your entry for the July challenge (A Midsummer's Night Dream! - voting begins July 9th) then get beading on a Art Deco!

See our FAQ here for all of the details on the rules of our challenges.

About 6 years ago now, during a period of illness when I was looking for something to do. I started off trying to follow patterns in various magazines, bought Carol Wilcox Wells 'Creative Beadweaving' and never looked back.

What is your favorite part of beadweaving?

That would have to be the magic of turning a small pile of beads into a sculptural little work of art!

Please tell us one little known or unknown fact about yourself?

I am a member of Mensa (don't know if that's any good - it's the only little known fact I can think of at the moment lol!)

What inspires You?

Nature, flowers, the sky, color and BEADS!

Kerrie has made three recent appearances in the UK beading magazine Bead.

Here she is in Issue 8 (Feb/mar 08) with her Herringbone cufflinks which made it onto the cover.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

One look at my office (or my house, for that matter) will tell you that I am not a paragon of neatness. Predictably, my beading workspace is a jumble of bead containers. Since I have the attention span of a gnat, I tend to flit from one color scheme to another, which only makes the jumble worse. But of greater consequence is that it contributes to that bane of beaders – bead soup.

While I do make some (OK, not very much) effort to corral beads into their containers as I finish with them, I inevitably allow a hodgepodge to accumulate around the edges of my beading tray. Every so often, I pour the buildup into a Ziploc bag. As the bag gets heavier, so does my guilt. Delicas aren't cheap, and bead soup seems like such a careless squandering of resources.

When I hefted my Ziploc bag of bead soup onto the postal scale at work, I was shocked. More than half a pound. That translates to almost 300 grams. Think of the per gram cost of Delicas. Yikes!

Of course, the bead soup wasn't all Delicas but rather a mix of sizes and types. It occurred to me that there had to be some way to run the soup through a sieve and at least separate out the sizes. But where to find such a thing? A kitchen strainer was too fine. A colander was too big. After doing a bit of poking around on the web, I discovered that sieves are A) quiteexpensive and B) a tool commonly used by soil scientists.

Aha! My office suite mate is a soil scientist (whose wife is a beader – how fortuitous!). I told Nels my idea and he promptly trotted off to the soils lab and brought me a stack of eight nested sieves. “Just pour the beads in the top,” he said. Idid, and within a few seconds, I had the beads sorted into three batches, ranging from 6/0s and 8/0s down to the Delicas and 14/0s.

Of course, the colors were still mixed, but it was progress nonetheless. At that moment, another of my work colleagues (a biochemist) mentioned that she would have her seven-year-old daughter Alex with her at work for the next few days. “Do you have any little tasks that might occupy her?” Oh, boy, did I ever!

The next day, I set Alex up with a bead mat, scoop and tweezers. Her mom raided her lab for a bunch of “weigh boats,” whichare little square trays just perfect for beads, and Alex happily spent the day sorting. By the end of the day, she'd worked her way through about half of the bag of largest beads and had done an impressive job categorizing. (I do plan to pay her, by the way!)

The next time I'm confronted with a bag of bead soup, I may not have such excellent resources available to me. And we all know an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I'm curious about how other beaders deal with this. I hope there are some creative solutions out there that will work even for the organizationally-challenged.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

In February 2008 Lynn was featured in an interview in Beadworkers Guild Journal. Lynn has been a member of the Beadworkers Guild in the UK for several years now and was delighted to be featured in a double-page interview in their journal. The article covers her beading ‘career’ from her early start in seed beading at the age of ten, to her discovery of the worldwide beadweaving community a few years ago, and how her first magazine project (also in the Journal) led eventually to her becoming a regular contributor to various beading magazines. The following image of ‘Chocolate Safari’ collar was featured in the article.

Lynn's Island Sunset Earrings were featured in Step by Step Beads, January 2008. The earrings use circular brickstitch with drop edging and fringe. Though they were originally rejected by the Beadwork editorial team, they very kindly passed them on to the Step by Step offices who decided to publish them. Lynn has hopes that the matching peyote collar and cuff may one day appear in print there too! The whole set is shown in this photo.

This piece, Rose Garden Collar was published in Bead (UK), February 2008. The result of one of Lynn’s ‘what-if’ experiments: what if I take a peyote strip and see just how much embellishment and fringing I can hang on it? Like most of her pieces, it’s in random colours, and the basis is very simple stitches, just lots and lots of them. The project was one of the most popular the magazine has ever run – they printed an entire gallery page of garden collars in the next issue – and the original set was sold in Lynn’s Etsy shop recently.

The Rose Garden Cuff was published in Bead (UK), April 2008. This is a simple peyote cuff in random colours with a leafy edging and a scaled-down version of the embellishments on the Rose Garden collar.

Lynn's Daisy Dreams Cuff was published in Beadwork (US), February 2008. It's another ‘what-if’ that was invented for an online challenge on one of the many forums Lynn inhabits. The theme was ‘wrapping paper’ and Lynn was very struck by the lilac, orange and green colour scheme in a piece of giftwrap she’d used for her niece’s birthday present. The stitch is a cross between daisy chain and right angle weave and has a lovely slinky drape; the Beadwork editors loved the project but chose a more muted and formal version for publication which you see here. You can see the original challenge version here and the pink summer version in her Etsy shop.

The Netted Game Board was published in Bead and Button (US) online, May 2008. A very, very long time ago Lynn learned an intriguing version of netting stitch from a beading book. It has an ingenious turn at one end that allows the netting to be symmetrical (the equivalent of odd-count peyote). She used it to make an entire chessboard (and says never again!) and then adapted it to make these fun little squares for playing tic-tac-toe (AKA noughts and crosses). They make great gifts and the best part is choosing glass nuggets, beads, or buttons to use as the playing pieces!

Lynn's Going Bananas Necklace was featured in Beadwork (US), June 2008. One of Lynn’s favourite beadmakers, Emma Ralph, once made a set of beads that were wild and wacky and just so, well, YELLOW that they frightened everybody away – until one brave beader decided that she just couldn’t resist the banana challenge! Lynn likes beads with personality, but this lot had so many ideas of their own that it took a very long time to settle them into a happy arrangement. However, with the aid of some beaded beads and a lot of re-engineering, they combined into a piece that is now one of Lynn’s firm favourites, and much to her surprise the Beadwork editors liked it too. And here is the image to prove that the glass colour really IS banana yellow!

And finally, Lynn's Rose Garden Earrings were published in Bead (UK), June 2008.These fringed circular brickstitch earrings are versions of one of the flowers from the Rose Garden collar. Lynn loves making these flowers, although she finds it hard to stick to matching pairs!

Monday, June 16, 2008

There were 707 votes this month and sweetfreedom's Do You Raku received the the most votes.

This lovely pendant, has a woven spiral rope with peacock freshwater pearls and several colors and sizes of glass seed beads, including slate blue, seafoam green, fuschia, and bronze. The matching peyote bail is embellished with seafoam green freshwater pearls with fringe dangles adorning the bail.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

The entries are in: Singly and collectively, they are simply stunning!

Voting begins on Saturday, June 7th. Please show your appreciation of these fantastic artists by embarking on the difficult task of voting for your favorite. (The ballot will be on the side bar at right.) The individual pieces are featured below the mosaic, and you can visit each entry for more information by following the link. Thank you!

The author says in the introduction to the book: "This book is full of variations. They can be learned in the basic sections of each chapter. They're offered up in the project instructions and can be seen in the gallery photos. Each picture shows another way -- we just have to be open to the view. If an idea comes to you, don't let it pass because there's no precedent. Try it; try another way of doing a stitch; try using different beads." The book will teach you new ways to look at the stitches we use. Good illustrations and suitable for anyone from beginner to more advanced beader.

This is a good basic book for a beader who has a bit of experience with off loom bead weaving. Coming to it with no knowledge would make the illustrations confusing. Included are instructions and illustrations for Peyote Stitch, Dutch Spiral, Netting, Spiral Rope, Right Angle Weave, Triangle Weave, Square Stitch, Daisy Chain, Ladder Stitch, Herringbone Stitch, Brick Stitch, African Polygon, African Helix, South African Scallop and Bead Crochet. In a ring binding so it will lay flat when you are following a pattern.

About Etsy Beadweavers

Etsy Beadweavers is a group of beaders who market their creations on Etsy.com. The Beadweavers' creations are different from many of the traditional beaded items, in that they are woven from hundreds or thousands of tiny beads to create intricate designs and pictures. These weavings take the form of both art and jewelry. Each piece takes many hours to complete, with some larger pieces taking weeks or even months.

This blog is devoted to the creations of this group of talented artisans.